Property renovation: Gargoyles are back in fashion

Gargoyles are making a comeback in cathedrals, gardens and new homes, says
Adam Edwards.

Gargoyles are making a comeback in homes and gardens as well as in cathedrals.

By Adam Edwards

7:00PM BST 06 Oct 2009

It is an old chestnut: pinch a garden gnome, send regular postcards or photographs from its travels to the bemused owner and then, in the dead of night, return the ornament from whence it came.

This humorous dodge has been given a new twist by Phyllida Law, the 77 year-old mother of actress Emma Thompson, who had a pair of gargoyles stolen two years ago from her West Hampstead home. She put a curse on the statues, and last month they were returned with a note, ''Help me please, I have been very ill since I stole these. Please lift the curse.''

It is hard to know if the joke is on Phyllida or if she is trying her hand at publicity for her daughter, who played Prof Sybil Trelawney in the Harry Potter films. Either way it is safe to say that nicking a cursed gargoyle is more upmarket than taking a stolen leprechaun through passport control. For the stone creature that decorates the gothic is born in the purple in comparison with the suburban hobgoblins that live among the hyacinths.

Lately the gargoyle has returned to fashion. Last month Oxford's Bodleian Library replaced its crumbling 400-year-old gargoyles with characters from The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Students at London's City and Guild art school are working on a set for Windsor Castle, while the Duchy of Cornwall recently bunged a dragon gargoyle over a hole made by a boiler pipe on one of its buildings in Poundbury (''the problem was considered at the highest level,'' reports the Duchy's newsletter).

Others are being commissioned by people building homes (they tend to cost £500 to £1,000 each, depending on the stone). ''We call them hunky punks down here,'' says Linda Williams, of the country's leading gargoyle-maker Wells Cathedral Stonemasons. ''We've had lords and ladies who wanted to put their carved heads on cornices, creatures on plinths – all sorts.'' And now there is a trend for garden gargoyles made from stone or terracotta.

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Gloucester Cathedral, meanwhile, is making a series of 13 grim creatures for its south aisle. The man charged with carving them is Pascal Mychalysin, a master mason from Burgundy, who has been at the cathedral for more than 20 years.

''There is the 'Mad King' and 'the labourer', the powerful and the powerless and the old man and the young man,'' Pascal says. ''I intended to model the Mad King on Boris Johnson, but it ended up looking more like Alan Rickman.''

Gargoyles are technically decorative water spouts that preserve stonework by diverting rainwater away from buildings (the word gargoyle derives from the French gargoille for throat and any other caricature of an animal or absurd human face is strictly speaking a ''grotesque'').

In Greek temples, the water from the roof passed through the mouths of lions whose heads were carved in the marble of the cornice. In Pompeii, terracotta gargoyles were found that were in the shape of animals. And in many American cities in the 19th and early 20th-century buildings they were used as decoration, most notably on the Chrysler Building in New York. But it was in medieval times that the gargoyle truly flourished.

''What excuse can there be for these ridiculous monstrosities in the cloister where the monks do their reading?'' wrote 12th-century reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux. His condemnation, however, did not halt the carving of the fantastic beasts for several more hundred years, many of them designed not only to divert water, but also to ward off evil.

By the time of the Renaissance, gargoyles were out of fashion and they did not return until the Victorian age when they perfectly complemented the period's love of the Gothic. Many of Augustus Pugin's buildings, for example, are decorated with them, including the House of Parliament. So, too, is the Natural History Museum that features many animals that are now extinct.

''Gargoyles are an expression of spontaneity by the stonemason,'' said Pascal, who says that if they are over-designed, as so often happened in Victorian times, they lose their freshness. ''They give the artisan a chance to flower. I don't pretend to be an artist or a sculptor. I am more like a cartoonist in stone.'' Many of the chiselling caricaturists, however, have not always been men of the finest sensibilities. There are, for instance, many gargoyles with bare bottoms through which the water runs (there are a couple on the Angel and Royal Hotel in Grantham that from the front of the hotel look innocuous but from the side it is obvious they are mooning) and others that appear to drool, spit or vomit when it rains.

In hindsight, it is lucky for the thief who stole Phyllida's gargoyles that, while they may have been cursed, they were at least not the vomiting sort.